Prabal Gurung / Spring 2014 RTW

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The conventions of fashion shows have their limits—one of them being that models trot by the audience at such a clip that in real time, it’s pretty impossible to contemplate the workmanship until the part of the service where all the girls come out at the same time for the finale walk-around, and even then you can end up with whiplash from trying to keep up. Prabal Gurung cleverly disrupted those proceedings today by sending all of his girls at once, at the beginning, and having them stand in two rows, facing the audience under great lighting, so that every aspect of his hyper-colored, hyper-worked, floral-splashed fifties-accented collection was under scrutiny for the duration of the show. “You know, what we do takes so long to make, I really wanted to let people see it,” Gurung said. The slightly creepy twist was that the girls were standing stock-still behind transparent plastic curtains before they broke off, one by one, to circulate the runway. What did Gurung mean? To evoke the tension of a Hitchcockian shower scene, or, perhaps, to make the girls seem as if they were mannequins in a climate-controlled museum archive? No, but close: the “preservation of the elegant woman” is the way he put it in his program notes.

Bert Stern’s “Last Sitting” photographs of Marilyn Monroe were cited as an influence, too—but thankfully Gurung didn’t labor over it. Still, there was something great about the pencil-skirted, calf-length, spindly-heeled proportions he chose to reiterate in punchily colored red, grass green, parma violet, pistachio, turquoise, and pink. On a beautiful woman with more human curves than the average six foot tall ironing-board mannequin, these looks will supply the kind of wiggle-in-the-walk, cup-runneth-over amplitude to keep males mesmerized. He didn’t fall into the trap of Mad Men period literalism, either. Although Gurung is inescapably following Raf Simons’s fifties-moderne lead at Christian Dior, there’s plenty to identify Gurung’s collection as different, and his own—down to the chunky-conceptual ear cuffs and rings (a collab with Chris Habana).

Technically, too, this was Prabal Gurung’s best collection to date. The way he caught up 3-D roses into bodies and halter necks, patchworked pencil skirts in leather, and successfully sculpted bra-topped cocktails and evening dresses from heavy duchesse satin and chiffon was impressive. At times, the increasingly accomplished Gurung does suffer from trying too hard. He could dial back on the complicated harness-back details, for instance, and easily win over lots more customers. Kudos to him, though, for working so hard so surpass himself each season.